Dodo cops blame for national internet outages

Telstra routers downed for 35 minutes.

Dodo has revealed a "minor hardware issue" was behind a Telstra outage that impacted multiple service providers and internet services nationwide.

The outage, which lasted approximately 35 minutes this afternoon, impacted an international link used by major service providers Telstra, Optus and iiNet for ADSL, cable and 3G data services.

Telstra said it had solved the issue but was still investigating what caused it.

Network engineers took to web forums with suspicions that a routing issue originating in Dodo's network had caused the issue.

Industry sources said the network issue came as a result of Dodo mistakenly issuing new IP route addresses from its system that confused Telstra's systems and caused blackouts on the AS1221 upstream router.

A memo purportedly from Optus, and posted to Whirlpool, indicated Dodo had "decided to advertise all the global routes it knows to Telstra and for some unknown reason Telstra then accepted these as 'best path' which in effect meant ALL traffic originating from the Telstra network would try and route traffic via Dodo".

Dodo chief executive Larry Kestelman confirmed the outage could be sourced to Dodo as the result of a "minor hardware issue".

"Telstra and us are investigating why this had such an overstated effect," he told iTnews.

A statement circulated to media last night by Kestelman clarified it was a "hardware issue with a Cisco border router".

It remains unclear, however, why the new IP routes issued by Dodo's network were accepted by Telstra routers.

Though the problem has been fixed in the meantime, it is expected engineers at both telcos will spend the next 48 hours investigating the outage before concluding the actual cause in Dodo's routers.

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